“... The interior, rarely photographed, is a mess of tacky ideas from the 1960s, reminiscent of a bingo hall in, say, Middlesbrough. Despite its name, opera cannot be performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban ...”

“... Soldier in Baghdad. This was to me extraordinary. I belong to the Church of England and have no wish to take sides in the quarrels of Muslims. Although I have always been attracted to Arabs, I am conscious of my pro-Jewish bias when considering political and military affairs in the Near East or Middle East. Yet here I was laying a wreath at a handsome ...”

“... established this stretch of riverside as a public space, and brought in its aftermath the Festival Hall, the National Film Theatre and, on the other side of Giles Gilbert Scott’s Waterloo Bridge, the new National Theatre. The next came in 1977, with the foundation of the Coin Street Action Group when, reacting against a decline in public housing and the ...”

“... itself.’ Schäfer’s call, and Brewer’s echoing of it, are amply answered in Empire of Words. No longer will scholars use OED in the same way that Scrabble players use the Shorter Oxford and Webster, as a Bible on matters linguistic. Nor, one imagines, could a post-Willinsky scholar do what Raymond Williams did in the Fifties and base a major intellectual ...”

“... Lindsay Anderson lives in a flat in one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century blocks behind John Barnes in Swiss Cottage. With its solid turreted houses, backing on gardens, Can-field, Compayne, Aberdare, Broadhurst, it’s the haunt of refugees, and Jewish old ladies, and perhaps (Lindsay would strike out that ‘perhaps’) the most European bit of ...”

“... piece of documentary realism and also a subtle account of the fact that realpolitik is often no more than brutal fantasy. And throughout all this, that sense of dailiness and ordinariness – which hereinafter I’ll refer to as D&O – remains intact. Powell is 92 this year. He has written 19 novels, four volumes of memoirs, one sort of biography (...”

“... Office and Special Branch. The emphasis of the documents was on subversive intent. ‘There is no equivalent focus on the phrase “activities … which threaten the safety or well-being of the state”.’ No one, Barr concluded,appears to have considered whether the level of intrusion occasioned by SDS long-term ...”

“... proposition in due course – in forty years, perhaps. JET is already as big as a concert hall, and still the horizon of exploitation is about forty years ahead. Another type of hot fusion device would focus laser pulses from all directions on a tiny pellet of the nuclear fuel, compressing, heating, and ‘igniting’ it before it has time to fly ...”

“... had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty thousand ...”

“... by the shabby grandeur, the misplaced Portland stone pomposity of the defunct Shoreditch Town Hall; a Renaissance palazzo, strident with towers, Ionic columns, allegorical figures and upbeat sloganeering: ‘More Light, More Power’. The scale of this structure, its link with Shoreditch Church broken by the railway bridge, distracts the restless knot of ...”

“... not receive a fair trial (as Armstrong’s solicitor pointed out in the LRB of 4 November 1993, no one had worried about prejudicial publicity at the time of the original trial). The prosecution of four officers involved in the case of the Bridgewater Four, wrongfully convicted of murdering a 13-year-old paperboy called Carl Bridgewater in 1978, was dropped ...”

“... who played the organ for the first performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah in Birmingham Town Hall in 1847, Mendelssohn himself wrote that ‘but for him I should have had no organ to play on. He ought to have a statue.’ It was left to a few critics like George Bernard Shaw to question not only the popularity of ...”

“... to believe that you are men in female attire.’ Stella was indeed one Ernest Boulton, music hall artiste and rent boy, and Fanny was Frederick Park, a trainee solicitor. At Bow Street police station they were arrested and charged with sodomy. Stella, it transpired, had been living as the wife of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton MP, who promptly died of ...”

“... No wonder people think of the secret services as farce or fiction. What is one to make of an organisation whose leaders have names like Dummy Oliver, Blinker Hall, Biffy Dunderdale, Lousy Payne, Buster Milmo, Pay Sykes, Tar Robertson, Barmy Russel and Quex Sinclair (not to be confused with his successor but one, Sinbad Sinclair)? It’s no good reassuring the reader that in the transition from Victorian days, when men called even their closest friends by their surnames, to the present time, when not to know the first name of a casual acquaintance makes it almost impossible to address him without appearing pompous or supercilious, nicknames like Stubby, Toby or Tubby came to be used as a gesture to informality, particularly in the Army and Navy ...”

“... newspapers.* Last summer? Well, that problem was solved last week when the Gospel according to St John, all 1300 pages of it, beat the dust out of the doormat. It is a sure sign that spring is in the air when Wisden arrives. While there is a good twelve months browse therein, one flick through is enough to stir the brain cells. It is the cricketer’s holy ...”